Jesse Ottele: 2013 40 Under 40 Honoree (Video)

Jesse Ottele started suiting up at commercial real estate company CBRE when he was a boy.

“I remember as a kid going in there in my baseball uniform selling candy bars to the brokers,” said Ottele, whose mom Maureen Ottele, was the office manager at CB Commercial, a CBRE predecessor.

These days he wears a business suit to the Seattle office, where he leads a seven-member team known for filling up largely vacant office buildings with tenants. Last year, the team generated about 30 percent of CBRE’s office leasing and sales revenue in the Puget Sound region where CBRE has 54 office brokers. Ottele was CBRE’s top-producing office leasing broker in the region in 2012 and has been a top-five producer for three years running.

Maureen Ottele thought commercial real estate would be a good fit for her boy, who did a college internship in the industry but didn’t think much about it. He was focused on his passion: baseball.

A catcher, Ottele was on the team at Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and was playing semi-pro ball when the scouts told him he might want to find a day job.

He ended up at CBRE in Seattle, where he started at the bottom in research. The work was tedious, and he thought about quitting. That changed when he offered to help successful commercial real estate broker Tim O’Keefe move one weekend.

O’Keefe, then with Colliers International, also had played college ball and the two hit it off. As they lugged furniture and boxes, O’Keefe asked Ottele to be his “runner,” or assistant. It was the late 1990s and the office market, fueled by the dot-com industry, was on fire, though work was still a slog for Ottele.

“As a runner, I was making 20 or 25 grand, and all of my buddies were worth a couple million, at least on paper,” he said. It wasn’t long, however, before success came. He was Colliers’ national rookie of the year in 2000.

Ottele no longer plays baseball but still tracks the game as an avid fan of the Seattle Mariners and applies the ins and outs of baseball to business.

In baseball, you learn from your strikeouts, he said, and then take those lessons to your next at bat. It’s the same in real estate.

After college, Ottele tried softball but couldn’t get excited about it. “I just kind of cut the cord with it and picked up golf.”

Both sports figure into his civic work, which among other things includes helping organize the M’s Care Golf Tournament that benefits the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

“I’m a decent golfer,” he said, adding a goal in the game as you get older is to shoot your age. When you’re under 40, that’s not easy.

“I can shoot by age on the front nine,” he said. “That’s about all I got right now.”

| IN HIS OWN WORDS |

Born: Seattle.

Grew up: Seattle.

Family status: Married.

Word that best describes you: Competitive.

How your parents influenced your career: My parents instilled hard work and responsibility at a young age. Additionally, my mom introduced me to commercial real estate as she worked at CB Commercial in the ’80s & ’90s.

Education: Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration, California Lutheran University.

Talent or fact about you that would surprise people: My photo is on the wall at the Downtown Seattle Benihana. Can you find me?

Cause that you are passionate about and why: Anything that has to do with kids. Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, as well as cancer research through Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Dining and Dealing: For fun celebrating — any of Ethan Stowell’s restaurants. For business celebrating — El Gaucho in Seattle and John Howie Steak in Bellevue.

How you define success: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming,” from “The Pyramid of Success,” by John Wooden. I look at and read it every day.

This inspires you: To keep going when the going gets tough.

What’s the best advice you ever received: That you get out of life what you put into it, so work hard at whatever you are passionate about, have fun and enjoy every day.

What business advice do you have for others: Write down your goals and read them daily. The more you read and see your goals, the more real and within reach they will become.

How you are a mentor: By leading by example. Success and hard work are contagious, just like hitting is in baseball. Surround yourself around good hard working people and it will rub off.

Biggest perks of your job: Meeting new people and that no one real estate deal is ever the same. Having said that, you are always learning something new in a real estate transaction be it a sale or a lease.

Legacy you want to leave: To bring out the best in people I work with from my co-workers to my clients. Also to be patient when you have nothing and humble when you have everything — because in our business things can change quickly.

The turning point in your career: I believe that the turning point in my career can be attributed to the real estate collapse in 2008 when one of my major clients failed and I had to reinvent my business plan. I believe that this gave me — and everyone in our business — a sense of reality and refocus. At that time, if you didn’t retool your business and work hard, you would have been looking for a new job.

Your next big career goal: To be CBRE’s top agency leasing broker in the Western Region.